Saturday, April 25, 2009

"Rent" opens at CdM, apparently with fewer problems than anticipated. Thank God! Everyone in the cast (and Hail, in particular) needs a break from all this 'drama'!

Here's the story from Brianna Bailey:

More than 300 students and supporters clogged the sidewalks outside Corona del Mar High School and shouted down three Westboro Baptist Church members who flew from Kansas to protest the school’s spring production of the musical “Rent” on Friday afternoon.

Waving signs that read “love conquers hate” and “God loves you,” students sang bits of the song “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” and cheered as passing motorists honked and pumped their fists in support.

“We had to do something to stand up for ourselves — we couldn’t just sit back and do nothing, because they were coming to our school,” said Emily Morris, 17, a senior at Corona del Mar.

A soloist in the school’s production of “Rent,” Morris organized the counter-demonstration through the social-networking website Facebook, attracting 362 people who said they would attend.

“Rent” opened Thursday to sold-out crowds after sparking national outcry when the school’s drama teacher claimed the principal initially nixed the production over concerns about gay characters in the script.

The school denies that claim, and production moved forward after the incident drew national media attention.

Now the ACLU is suing the Newport-Mesa Unified School district, claiming the school fosters an environment rife with homophobia that is hostile to gay and female students.

Members of the Topeka, Kan.-based church known for picketing the funerals of Iraq war veterans across the country, waved signs with anti-gay slurs and dragged American and Israeli flags on the ground across the street from the school as students left class Friday.

After the JCS opening, Sally presented Steve and Jan with an engraved cake server and knife, commemorating DMTC's 25th anniversary (and retiring the spatula that had previously been used for the purpose).

Technical issues in Act I were virtually flawless. In Act II, there were a few minor problems with Pilate's microphone, but he was speaking loudly enough anyway that there was no loss of understanding.

Friday, April 24, 2009

In the same category as Holocaust Deniers and AIDS Deniers. Much like Dick Cheney did with the Eel River salmon a few years ago, California Republicans decide to kill the fish for short-term political gain:

WASHINGTON – As the politics of water grow more intense on Capitol Hill, Republican Rep. Tom McClintock is skeptical that there's really a shortage in California, even though the governor has declared a drought emergency.

"Don't forget we have the most water-rich region in the state," said McClintock, a newcomer on the House Natural Resources Committee, who represents California's 4th Congressional District. "And yet our communities are in … drought alerts, not because of a shortage of water, but because of water that the environmental regulations allow us to use."

It is becoming a common refrain for some Republicans in Washington: California's drought is human-made and could be resolved easily if government focused more on people, less on smelt.

Republican Rep. Wally Herger of California's 2nd District called it a "regulatory drought" that has been intensified by the Endangered Species Act.

And Republican Rep. George Radanovich of California's 19th District assailed "the draconian regulations that turn simple fish into the worshipful gods of the environmental community" while ignoring the rights of people.

"We need the government to protect the safety and happiness of people, not fish," he said.

A Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not "persons" according to it's interpretation of a statute involving religious freedom.

The ruling sprang from an appeal of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, which was thrown out in Jan. 2008. "The court affirmed the district court's dismissal of the constitutional and international law claims, and reversed the district court's decision that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applied to Guantanamo detainees, dismissing those claims as well," the Center for Constitutional Rights said.

..."[The] Court reaffirmed its decision from last year that detainees are not 'persons' for the purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was enacted in 1993 to protect against government actions that unreasonably interfere with religious practices," the release continued. "Last year, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Court of Appeals panel who issued the decision today, referred to the Court’s holding that detainees are not 'persons' as 'a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.'"

The torture lobby is still very strong, has all the air waves open to it, and it will require a lot of work to defeat it:

Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

I was wondering about this. Several weeks ago, Jean pointed out to me that air travel was going to be subsidized between America and New Zealand and Australia, and thus lower fares could be anticipated.

From San Francisco to Auckland round trip, there seem to be a range of prices: $900 - $1,900.

I have never seen airfares as low as they now are between New Zealand (Auckland) and the US, especially LAX (and San Fran is not much higher). For $700 US dollars you can fly roundtrip, including all taxes. So if you wanted to visit NZ and Australia (where the fares as just as good), there has never been a better time. http://www.airnz.com/ is the website for Air New Zealand and they have excellent service (I fly them all the time) - this is a very low fare for top quality service.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do with that cause-and-effect post. The links to the first two photos don't seem to match up with your introductory remarks. (I don't know what to make of that guy's comments about Gore's movie -- I think he must have been on something when he wrote them.)

I reply:

I was trying for a more hallucinatory, child's eye effect, but looking at it now, it looks mostly lame. That's what happens when you try to say something profound in 100 words, or less. You end up sounding like Miss Teen South Carolina, or something.

(Plus, I was trying to cram the picture of the ramjet cow into some kind of sensible thought. Harder to do than I thought.)

The human race has made many changes to the Earth's surface. There are ever so many more cows today than prior to the start of agriculture and animal husbandry, plus we are also burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels. Released gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide, are effective at trapping the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects on the Earth's surface, further heating the surface of the Earth.

Left: The folks from work headed over to Michelangelo's to celebrate "Administrative Professionals (formerly Secretary's) Day".

Left: Chief Administrative Professional (aka, telephone jockey) Jean Henderson is retiring, in order to focus more attention on wardrobe successes and malfunctions for a community-based musical theatre company in Davis, California.

Left: When Jean and her husband Alec recently closed their meat-pie shop in Dixon, California, they were faced with a dilemma: What to do with all the beer?

WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House.

Philip D. Zelikow, who worked on interrogation issues as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, said the flawed decision-making badly served Mr. Bush and the country.

“Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the best law enforcement and military interrogators, and lessons from the painful British and Israeli experience,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Especially in a time of great stress, walking into this minefield, the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.”

My daily readings led me to an interview with Newt Gingrich in Christianity Today. The former speaker was asked whether opposition to tax increases was an adequate "uniting message" for his party. Gingrich replied that there had to be more to the party's story. For instance, he said:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You'll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah.

That seemed, frankly, ridiculous. I happened to know that the "Hamilton" in question was from Indiana and had a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal jurist. I also happened to know that "her" first name was David, so Gingrich could not get even this basic fact straight (obviously, he assumed, only some sort of Wiccan lesbian could deliver such a ruling!). So I wanted to know more.

I Googled around, and sure enough, a search returned thousands of rabid posts from the wing-o-sphere about this judge who thinks Indianans should be allowed to pray to Allah but not to Jesus.

...I had to slog my way through about four or five pages of this nonsense on the returned results, but eventually I found my way to the actual case, and I went and looked up Hamilton's actual decision.

...Naturally, it's all a lie, but as I said, even I was shocked at how rancidly despicable a lie it was.

...What kind of person can say or write such blatant lies? And I'd like to report that this is unusual, but this kind of slippery illogic is standard operating procedure on today's right. Find something that might inflame opinion and stoke prejudice, and pump it. Doesn't matter that it isn't really true. By the time the other side explains that it isn't true, we'll already have won. They know that no one's going to read page 49 of a legal opinion. As it happens this time someone did, but often, alas, they're right.

These are sick, sick people. May their Jesus consign them to history's ash heap.

Let's just say that Members Of Congress make much more inviting targets than fantasy camel jockeys running taxi cabs/terrorist cells somewhere in the Midwest:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday he had “great concern” over news reports that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) was wiretapped during a federal probe into Israeli agents, and he vowed to personally look into whether there should be an investigation into wiretapping of Members of Congress.

“The stories that I’ve read give me great concern. I’m going to be in the process personally of finding out more about it and then, with the Speaker, determining what action, if any, needs to be taken,” Hoyer said Wednesday during a meeting with reporters.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Didn't read the whole thing. Kept stumbling across the thought-pebbles:

April 1, 2009: They don't see me as I slip through this multiplex, down shadowy troughs of aisles that reek of the corruption of butter topping gone sour in perverse imitativeness and price inflation. Someday they will cleanse these aisles. Someday the bonelike crunch beneath my shoes, the viscosity like drying blood, will stop crying in my ears like the anguish choked back by an abused boy, the kind who's alone and smashes people and narrates highly regarded graphic novels. But not tonight. Tonight, in what we've made of America, even the dark rain that has been falling for hours in this theater won't wash away the sick popcorn of human depravity, because there are only three people left who are willing to buy tickets for Watchmen, and as I sink into a shame of lumpish upholstery the other two avert their eyes. One of them looks like Nixon.

So this is what we've become: a sparse and flaky excrescence on the surface of mass-market culture, like dandruff in the thin hair of an aging character actor. Soon the show will begin, and for 162 minutes I will witness the truth of Watchmen. Not the false truth of "a movie," which the others will see, but the true truth of a significant pattern in contemporary thought and social life, visible only to me and my dying kind. Freak, they call me. Psycho. Vigilante. Film critic.

I find all this worry about handshaking to be baffling. Presidents have shook hands with all kinds of characters over the years.

Handshakes can be symbolic of course, which means that the symbols have to kept under control, as Obama did, by shaking hands in the context an international forum where national leaders meet on an equal footing. To overemphasize and harp upon phantasmagorical meanings that aren't there betrays the deepest insecurity.

These are hard-driving times at work, and so it was no surprise that co-worker Frank came banging at my door, demanding my focused attention. But it wasn't the anomalies of Fairbanks weather that needed attention, but rather that his daughter Mia really liked a certain book, "Yakov And The Seven Thieves", written by Madonna, and illustrated by Gennady Spirin.

I read the book (in work-mode, it took five minutes to read, plus another ten to look at the fabulous illustrations), and I liked it as well. Madonna and Spirin are an excellent team, and the Russian/Karbala inspirations have served them well.

Temperatures are expected to be just under 90 degrees in Sacramento -- toasty, but short of the record of 92 degrees set in 1984. Today's high temperature in Sacramento is expected to be about 88 degrees.

On Tuesday, downtown Sacramento hit 94 degrees, 19 degrees above the average high and near the 1931 record of 96 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

Other cities set records: Stockton, 97 degrees; and Modesto, 98. Coastal cities didn't get much relief with Santa Cruz hitting 97 degrees and San Francisco, 87.

The high-pressure ridge causing hot conditions is shifting east, and the Delta breeze will start to move inland, ushering cooler temperatures to the valley.

"We could be getting cooling from the Delta after midnight and then continue through the morning," said NWS meteorologist Eric Kurth.

The forecast for Thursday calls for a high of 76 degrees, which is about average for the date. The cooling might even give Sacramento below-normal temperatures for Friday and the weekend when temperatures in the high 60s and low 70s are forecast.